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This website covers knowledge management, personal effectiveness, theory of constraints, amongst other topics. Opinions expressed here are strictly those of the owner, Jack Vinson, and those of the commenters.

The ever-popular productivity book Getting Things Done, by David Allen, caught on fire within the last few years through the power of blogs. And while many a blogger has fallen in love with GTD, and in fact many GTD blogs have been created, it’s time that a “GTD for Bloggers” was created.

The article provides a nice overview of Getting Things Done and on how to apply the process to blogging. The basic steps look like (my version):

Collect (into as few "Inboxes" as possible). This is essentially the setup stage. Get everything collected into one place (papers, emails, things to be read, etc). The fewer actual / virtual piles the better. If you can put it all in one place, excellent! Make sure new stuff can come into the pile to be processed.

Process. Process the pile a once or twice a day with the goal of processing the pile to empty. Some stuff will get "done," such as responding to blogger comments. Other stuff will get placed into the appropriate project file, such as "write a post about X" or "respond to this comment with more detailed thoughts" with the appropriate first action.

Do. All those projects that you processed? Get cracking. Write those posts, work on that project, tweak your website, etc. Next actions get back into the project folder.

Review. Set aside a weekly review the system to make sure nothing has fallen through the cracks.

Note: I've left off Leo Babauta's "one inbox" and "organize" because I think they are subsets of "collect" and "process," respectively.

As some of the commenters noted, this example of GTD in action seems to be specific to the type of blogging that is expository, rather than a participation in a larger community. In other words, where is the "read other blogs" activity?

That activity falls under "process" or "do," depending on where I am. If I have the time for reading (either as set-aside time or as free time), I process my reading list / RSS feeds by my internal priority mechanism. The GTD element comes in when I come across articles that are worthy of deeper reads (such as those that point to longer articles) or which inspire my own blog posts. This is where GTD thinking becomes handy: Put the reading into some form of to-be-read folder (and have a process for emptying that folder). And put the "write this post" into its project folder.

Sadly, the way this looks for me right now is to open to-be-processed web pages in multiple tabs in my browser. These suck energy every time I see them sitting there. Similarly with my to-be-written articles, they each have their own BlogJet window sitting there, waiting for me to write. I'd like a better, reliable mechanism for this kind of thing too. And I think that is what Leo Babauta was trying to do with the article.

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This blog is about knowledge management, personal effectiveness, theory of constraints and other topics. Opinions expressed here are strictly those of the owner, Jack Vinson, and those of the commenters.